How important do you think it is for a game to accurately represent locations you know about if you can explore those locations? A game like Midnight Club, for example, might give you races in New York, Paris or London, but will likely only include major streets and landmarks. Alternately, games like GTA present you with fictional city analogues (like San Andreas) that hint at a location, but don't have to faithfully represent it. Which approach would you prefer, assuming you could hop around the globe at will and visit major cities set both in the near and far future (ie, Geneva 2020, Geneva 2100, etc.)?

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Side question: What do you think is necessary to capture the rough feel of a place? Would the tourist highlights (like Golden Gate Bridge, Eiffel Tower, Pyramids at Giza) girded by randomly generated streets and shops do?

My first thought is that the game you appear to be working is surely set far further in the future than 2020.

Having said that, the importance of landmarks depends upon what you can do in the city. If you can fly around in it, then landmarks are going to be useful for helping to set the scene. If you can only walk or take groundcars, then landmarks may not be as important.

I don't know what happens in the near future in your game's timeline, but if there was a third-world war which destroyed all major cities, then you have a good excuse for not having accurate representations of existing cities. If a country's major cities are destroyed, its infrastructure would be effectively destroyed and would need to be restored. Those settlements that survived the bombardment would find themselves rebuilt to form the backbone of the society's new infrastructure. So it's okay if you don't have every little town and village represented, although depending upon your resources you could look into mapping the locations of current towns so that runtime generated towns could be in roughly the same place.

Having lived in my town for four years, I only know a few of the streets. Aliens could come during the night and rearrange 90% of my town and I wouldn't notice.

From a technical standpoint, it seems unlikely that the existing street layouts of towns would change over the next 100 years, unless new technology comes along that makes such changes far far cheaper than they would be today, or if the streets are destroyed by nuclear (or more exotic) weapons.

What's likely to be more important than recreating a layout is recreating the stylistic conventions of the place. Countries have different styles of buildings, and cities reflect the architectural mode of the time of their construction. I would be surprised to find London streets lined with sukiya zukuri style homes, or rows of terraced houses in Chandigarh.

I don't think it's really important, but it would help a lot to the experience if you were like "hey I have been there, and it's just like that!".

I would say that if the time is set in the future, it is more important to show the most prominent properties of a city, because after all, it will change and you don't know how.

If it were set in the present an accurate representation would be something like a nice touch to the game but it's not something that will cause any negative response from the player if the city isn't accurately represented. However of course, the opposite would generate a more positive response from players that know those places. So might not make sense to accurately represent Paris if your game is going to be sold mostly in the US.

I've heard of people acting out their commute in True Crime: Streets of LA, or policing their neighborhood. I don't think that level of fidelity is called for. Other times, like in Deus Ex, I've found myself visiting different cities, all of which seem to consiste entirely of square architecture, poorly lit alleyways and fire escapes. That doesn't do the job.

I think architecture has a lot to do with the feel of a city. European cities with their narrow little roads and tiny cars and low, older buildings can be contrasted with the high-rise, four-lane, SUV style of American cities.

Mostly, I think the people, the signs and businesses, and the name of the airport are enough to let you know you're in a foreign city.

What do you have in mind here? Will you be living in these cities? Visiting them? Ask an airline pilot: the Holiday Inn in Kiev is a lot like the one in Baghdad or the one in Paris. Fighting in them? I probably won't notice if the roadsign I'm hiding behind says "Broadway Exit" or "Rue St. Marie".

Find the distinguishing characteristics that the character will encounter, and focus on showing those to the player.

This is one of those issues where it is only meaningful to those who know. Having an accurate recreation of city where the player can drive down familer roads and see familer street scape will go along way to make them connet with the game. However for those people who don't know the city those added details are meaningless. The best comprimise is to capture the feel of the city and its various areas. So that even those people who only know a little about the place will feel you have done a good job. This can be a simple as ensuring that if you drive into china town it looks like a china town and not the same downtown look as the rest of the city. Even with generated content this will be challenging to do for more then a couple of places. Things like defining neibourhoods, style and type of buildings, even the width the of streets will all have to be at least partialy accurate to make the player feel they are in the same city they know.

I think that good architectural feel is much more important than making it exactly like the the city. If you investigate the style of architecture that is widely used in the town, and match your design with this, it will go very far in making the town feel authentic. This is really powerful if you do it right. For instance, here in Las Vegas, much of the newer homes have a very southwestern feel. The older neighborhoods, on the other hand, have more of a trendy 70s architectural feel to them, without the southwestern influence.

However, when a city is SUPPOSED to be somewhere that I am familiar with, and makes a point of trying to copy the city itself (as opposed to just giving a visual feel of it), the one thing I find very very frustrating is when major roads aren't laid out the way they are in real life. It's understandable to me if every road isn't mapped out, but I think it's important to make sure that the major streets line up and flow like they're supposed to is very important to making it feel like home to the people familiar with the area.

Throwing in a few landmarks, even if they don't look like they do in real life (destroyed, run down, etc.) is a nice touch and adds a good feel to the realism of the area, but I don't think it's as necessary as a correct street layout.

When you talk about randomly created cities, the one thing that matters to me is- Will it be the same every time?

Nothing is more frustrating than playing a game where the same city can be completely different after you leave and come back. When you have to find every store every time it becomes a true annoyance.

I understand this is usually done as a memory issue. When lots of cities are available, storing each in memory can cause real issues. One way to get around this would be to store a short randomization seed for each city. Each number would result in dramtically different cities but each would be reproducible every time.

Regarding the different feels to a city, you could create a city "texture map". Each texture would describe the feel of the area. My city that I live in now has:
-an old rich neighborhood with smaller boulevards and big houses.
-industial areas with large indescript factories
-middle class residential with rows of similar houses stacked upon one another
-inner city
-"bad areas"
-suburbs
-nouveaux riche
-etc

Once the textures are created, you can make the same map look different from city to city by switching street names and building locations

(creating city textures would be a great mod area to leave open.)

As far as whether or not exact representations are important, I would say no. Although by creating a modable feature, you leave open the possiblity of others help fill that gap by creating specific textures for cities.

Thats my thoughts.